Proceedings ISC-2 on Geotechnical and Geophysical Site Characterization, Viana da Fonseca & Mayne (eds.

)
2004 Millpress, Rotterdam, ISBN 90 5966 009 9

Neural networks in soil characterization

W. Ding & J.Q. Shang
Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada

Keywords: Artificial Neural Network (ANN), complex permittivity, soil characterization

ABSTRACT: The complex permittivity of a soil recovered from a landfill site in Halton, Ontario, Canada, is
measured using a custom developed apparatus in laboratory in the frequency range from 0.3 MHz to 1.3 GHz.
The soil samples were compacted at various water contents, densities and degrees of saturation. A database
consisting of the complex permittivity measurement of 122 soil specimens is established and three ANN
models are trained, verified and tested to predict the soil water content, degree of saturation, and dry density.
The results show that three ANN models perform well as evaluated in terms of RMS/Data Mean and
correlation coefficients. The results of this study show promising potential for the further development of an
in-situ soil property measurement system.
1

INTRODUCTION

The measurements of soil water content, density and

degree of saturation are commonly practiced in
geotechnical investigation and quality control of
earthworks. The soil samples are collected from
boreholes and their subsequent testing in the
laboratory is often time consuming and expensive.
The geophysics based techniques, such as electrical,
electromagnetic, gravitational, magnetic, and
radiometric methods, have shown promising
potential in soil characterization. Among these
techniques, the complex permittivity, which is
measured through transmission and reflection of
electromagnetic waves, is a relatively new concept
in geotechnical engineering applications and has
advantage over other methods such as the electrical
conductivity (resistivity) and dielectric constant (e.g.
resistivity survey, time-domain-reflectometry (TDR)
etc.) mainly because the complex permittivity
reflects the polarization and conduction behavior of
soil in a broad frequency spectrum. A single
measurement of the complex permittivity provides a
set of data, typically in the order of several
hundreds, in a specific measurement frequency
range.
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are used to
capture the multi-variable relationship between the
complex permittivity and soil properties. ANN is a
massive distributed processor, which simulates the
performance of biological neurons and the internal

operation of human brains. ANNs have been applied

in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering
research for prediction, classification, approximation, and recognition.
In this study, ANNs are trained using a database,
including complex permittivity, water content,
density, degree of saturation, and pore fluid
chemistry of 122 soil specimens from Halton Till, a
site specific soil. Three ANN models are developed
for soil property characterization based on the
database, namely, the prediction of the soil water
content, degree of saturation, and dry density. The
performance of the models is evaluated using
statistical tools.
2

BACKGROUND

The complex permittivity is an electrical property of

materials. The complex permittivity * (F/m) is
expressed as:

* = ' j "

(1)

where ' (F/m) is the real part of complex

permittivity representing polarization of the
material, or the ability to store electrical energy in an
electric field, j =
1 , and " (F/m) is the
imaginary part of complex permittivity (the loss
factor) describing the loss of the electrical energy in
the material and is related to the electrical
conductivity of the material (Kraszewski, 1997). The
889

combination of these two parts reflects the response

including polarization and conduction of constituents (atoms, molecules, etc) of the material in an
applied electric field. The relative complex permittivity, which is the complex permittivity normalized
by the permittivity of vacuum 0 (F/m), is
commonly used in practice.

* '
"
= j = r ' j r "
(2)

*
where r (dimensionless) is the relative complex
permittivity, r ' (dimensionless) is the relative
r* =

permittivity, r " (dimensionless) is the relative loss

factor, and 0 is the permittivity of vacuum, where

0 = 8.854 10-12 F/m. In this study, the relative

complex permittivity data are used throughout the

ANN modeling process.
The research on the complex permittivity of soil
has been conducted by a number of researchers.
Santamarina and Fam (1997) measured the complex
permittivity of bentonite and kaolinite in the
frequency range from 0.2 GHz to 1.3 GHz at various
soil moisture contents and solution concentrations.
Klein and Santamarina (1997) discussed the method
of complex permittivity measurement. Kaya and
Fang (1997) reported the complex permittivity of
bentonite and kaolinite mixed with methanol or
aniline. Thevanayagam (1994) discussed the
interaction effects of particle shape, orientation,
porosity, and relative disparity between electrical
parameters (conductivity and dielectric constant) of
soil particles and pore fluid on electrical response of
bulk soil. Chaudhari et al. (2001) measured
dielectric relaxation on ethanol-nitrobenzene and
ethanol-nitrotoluene binary mixtures at various
concentrations and temperatures. Boyarskii et al.
(2002) suggested a model of dielectric properties to
describe dielectric and radiophysical properties of
wet soils. Kaya (2002) used dielectric constant in a
low frequency range to evaluate soil porosity.
The second authors research group has worked
on the complex permittivity of soil. The work
included the development of complex permittivity
measurement systems for compacted soil (Shang et
al. 1999; Scholte et al. 2002) and soil permeated
with chemical solutions (Rowe et al. 2001); complex
permittivity measured on soil samples with various
water contents, densities, degrees of saturation, pore
fluid compositions (including soil contaminated by
heavy metals, organic compounds and landfill
leachate), etc. (Shang and Rowe, 2003, Rowe et al.
2002, Shang et al. 2000, Scholte 1999, Xie 1999,
Josic 2001). Shang et al. (2000) presented a work on
using multiple linear regression analysis to link the
complex permittivity and soil water content, density
890

and salinity. However, the interactions between the

complex permittivity and numerous influencing
factors are non-linear and complicated, the quantitative characterization of soil is limited to a rather
narrow range of soil properties. Therefore, a more
advanced analysis tool - artificial neural network is
introduced in this research.
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are computerbased models that simulate neural structures of
human brain neurons. ANNs learn from input
information in the same way as human brains, where
brain cells provide people with abilities to
remember, think, analyze, and apply previous
experiences to corresponding actions. The most
distinguished property of ANNs is that they have
abilities such as generalization, pattern recognition,
image and speech recognition, classification,
prediction, mathematical analysis, simulation of
sophisticated physical processes, and quality control.
A typical structure of an ANN consists of a number
of processing units, or neurons, which are usually
arranged in layers: an input layer, an output layer
and hidden layers, as shown in Figure 1. The input
layer is employed to introduce input variables. The
hidden layers and output layer are fully or partially
connected to the units in the input layer, which play
internal roles and produce outputs in the execution
of the network. For details on the mechanism of
ANNs, readers are referred to Trajan (1999).
Hidden
Layer
Input

Out

Figure 1. Typical Structure of an ANN

ANNs in soil characterization applications have

been reported in literature. For example, Goh (1995)
applied neural networks to analyze cone penetration
test (CPT) data for foundation design parameters;
Baldi et al. (1986) used the neural network to model
the non-linear relationship between the cone tip
resistance and the relative density of sand and the
mean effective stress; Chang and Islam (2000)
employed artificial neural networks to predict soil
moisture measured by a remote sensing apparatus;
Kurup and Dudani (2002) used artificial neural
networks to profile the overconsolidation ratio
(OCR) of clays using piezocone penetration test
(PCPT) data; Penumadu and Zhao (1999) employed
ANNs to model the stress-strain and volume change
behavior of sand and gravel under drained triaxial
compression test conditions; Najjar et al. (1996)
employed artificial neural networks for predicting
soil compaction parameters; Schaap and Leij (1998)
applied artificial neural networks to predict soil
hydraulic conductivity and soil water retention.
2004 Millpress, Rotterdam, ISBN 90 5966 009 9

3 COMPLEX PERMITTIVITY OF HALTON

TILL

In addition, the static electrical conductivity and

electrode polarization have considerable effects in
the low frequency range. In the data analysis,
therefore, the complex permittivity values in the
frequency range of 200 MHz to 500 MHz are used
based on the above considerations, including 47
pairs of real and imaginary parts at corresponding
frequencies for each soil specimen. In the
development of the ANN models, as will be
discussed in the next section; the complex permittivities at certain specific frequencies are selected
based on modeling needs.
The variations of the complex permittivity traces
shown in Figure 2 as a function of soil properties
illustrate the potential of using the complex permitti-

40

'

30
20
10
0

200

400

600

800

Frequency [MHz]
40

30

"

In order to study the complex permittivity of a soilwater electrolyte system, it is essential to measure
the complex permittivity in the frequency spectrum
of interests, including the real and imaginary parts,
on soil specimens with known properties, such as
water content, degree of saturation, density and pore
fluid chemistry. A laboratory measurement system
was developed for measuring the complex permittivity of compacted or undisturbed soil specimens
(Shang et al. 1999).
The Halton till, a soil recovered from Halton,
Ontario, Canada, is used in this study. A total of 122
soil specimens were prepared in a rather broad range
of physical and chemical properties. The water
contents vary from 6.0% to 21.7%, with an average
of 14.7 %; the dry densities vary from 1.60 Mg/m3
to 2.08 Mg/m3, with an average value of 1.88
Mg/m3; the degrees of saturation vary from 36.7% to
100%, with an average value of 84.8%. The soil
specimens were compacted under pre-determined
water contents and compaction energy. The complex
permittivity of soil specimens was measured in the
frequency range of 0.3 1300 MHz. Details on the
measurement procedure can be found in Shang et al.
(1999) and Scholte et al. (2002). Figure 2 shows
three typical traces of the real and imaginary parts of
the complex permittivity versus frequency at various
water contents, degrees of saturation, dry densities
and pore fluid compositions. It may be seen from the
figure that:
(1) Both real and imaginary parts of the complex
permittivity are very high in the low frequency
range (f < 100 MHz for the real parts and f <
200 MHz for the imaginary parts), which is
mainly attributed to electrical double layer
polarization, as discussed previously;
(2) (2) Dielectric dispersion begins from f ~ 400
MHz and approaches to ~ 2 before 800 MHz,
after which all traces converge.

20
10
0
0

200

400

600

800

Frequency [MHz]

Figure 2. Typical complex permittivity traces. (a) Real part, (b)

imaginary part

vity for soil characterization. On the other hand, they

also indicate the complexity of the problem as the
traces are controlled by multiple factors
simultaneously. Without a proper analytical tool, it
is very difficult to distinguish a single soil property.
It should be pointed out that in this study all
measurements were made atroom temperature with
variations of less than 1 C. Therefore the effect of
temperature is not considered in the modelling
process. With further enhancement of the database,
he temperature effect can be incorporated into an
ANN model as well.
4 CHARACTERIZATION OF SOIL
PROPERTIES USING ANN MODELS
The artificial neural network (ANN) is used as a
modeling tool to relate the complex permittivity and
soil properties by means of commercial software
Trajan 4.0 (1999). The software allows the
programmer to construct linear or non-linear models
to solve multi-variable regression and classification
problems. For characterization of soil properties of
Halton Till, namely, the soil water content, degree of
saturation, and dry density, a series of artificial
neural networks with various architectures are
designed and trained using experimental results on
122 soil samples, and the best 3 models are retained
for the prediction of the three target properties. The
complex permittivities of Halton Till measured from
200 MHz to 500 MHz and soil property parameters

Proceedings ISC2 on Geotechnical and Geophysical Site Characterization, Viana da Fonseca & Mayne (eds.)

891

are used as inputs and outputs, respectively, to feed

into the designed networks for supervised training.
The trial and error method is used to design ANN
architectures, select function parameters, and
conduct input variable selection during modeling
processes. The selections of network type
(Multiplayer Perceptions (MLP), Radial Basis
Function Networks (RBF) and Linear Networks
(LN), Trajan, 1999), selection of function
parameters (the learning rate, momentum, and
number of epochs) and the architecture design are
iteratively carried out and fine tuned during the
modeling process.
The uniqueness in the ANNs modeling in this
study is the input variable selection. This is because:
1. The large quantity of the input variables (94
complex permittivity ( ' and " ) data for each
soil specimen measured at 47 specific
frequencies in the frequency range of 200 MHz
to 500 MHz), corresponding to only 1 set of
output variables, such as water content, dry
density and degree of saturation for each
measurement);
2. The limited training data (122 sets of complex
permittivity measurement of soil specimens).
Therefore, reducing the input variables and
nework
complexity
becomes
extremely
important to improve the network performance.
A case-specific modeling procedure is developed
to select the input variables and network function
parameters, design ANN architectures, and
optimize the network performance. The input
variable selection is performed following four
steps to fit the designed networks (Ding 2002),
i.e.,
(1) Inputs ( and ) are selected in the
frequency range from 200 MHz to 300 MHz,
300 MHz to 400 MHz, and 400 MHz to 500
MHz, respectively, to feed into the designed
networks;
(2) Based on the performance of networks, the
important inputs as judged by the program
are retained;
(3) The retained inputs are divided into different
combinations to fit the designed networks.
Meanwhile, the network function parameters
are fine adjusted to match the input
combinations and network architectures, thus
to optimize the network performance;
(4) The trained networks are compared for their
performance and architecture complexities,
and the best networks are retained.
In the following sections, three ANN models for
the prediction of soil water content, degree of saturation and dry density are presented and discussed.

892

4.1 ANN-M1- Prediction of Soil Water Content

The relationship between the real part of the
complex permittivity (also known as the dielectric
permttivity or dielectric constant) and soil water
content has been long recognized and used in
practice, e.g. Wang and Schmugge (1980) and Top
et al. (1980). However, the studies are all based on a
specific soil with property parameters such as
density and pore fluid chemical composition kept
relatively constant. To train the ANN model for
prediction of soil water content of Halton Till with
the density and pore fluid composition varying in a
relatively broad range, 122 data sets are divided into
74 training, 24 verification and 24 testing data sets.
The complex permittivity measured on the 74 soil
specimens are used as inputs, and the soil water
content data are used as target outputs to feed into
designed networks for supervised training. Then 24
data sets are used to verify the network performance.
Finally, the network predicts the soil water contents
of 24 soil specimens in the testing phase. The
predicted values by an ANN are compared with
actual values from experiments, and the network is
fine adjusted to reduce the error between the
predicted value and actual value. The best network is
an MLP network with nine neurons in the input
layer, ten neurons in the hidden layer and one
neuron in the output layer, as shown in Figure 3. The
nine neurons correspond to nine inputs as the real
parts of complex permittivities () measured at
frequencies 201 MHz, 472 MHz, 485 MHz, and 498
MHz, and the imaginary parts () measured at
frequencies 201 MHz, 207 MHz, 311 MHz, 414
MHz and 427 MHz. The single output corresponds
to the soil water content. Sensitivity analyses are
performed to evaluate the importance of each input
variable to the corresponding output. In Figure 3, the
input neurons are arranged in the order of their
relative importance. The imaginary part at frequency
311 MHz ((311 MHz)) plays the most significant
role among the nine inputs according to the
sensitivity analysis. Details of the regression
statistics are shown in Table 1. The soil water
content (output) mean values for the training data
sets, verification data sets and testing data sets are
14.8%, 14.6% and 14.7%, respectively. The Root
Mean Squared (RMS) error function is defined as
(Trajan, 1999):
n

RMS =

(X

Pi

X Mi ) 2

i =1

(4)

where X Pi is the predicted output of the ith data set,

X Mi is the measured output of the ith data set, and n
is the total number of all data sets. The ratio of RMS
versus the data mean (RMS/Data-Mean) is used to
2004 Millpress, Rotterdam, ISBN 90 5966 009 9

evaluate the network performance. The RMS/DataMean values in the training, verification and testing
data sets are 6.3%, 10.9% and 6.5% respectively.
The correlation coefficients (R2) for the training,
verification and testing data sets are 0.94, 0.91 and
0.91, respectively. The results indicate that the
model is able to capture the relationship between the
inputs (complex permittivity) and outputs (soil water
content) and can be used to predict the soil water
content of Halton Till when other soil properties
change in a relatively broad range.

'(201MHz)
"(317MHz)
"(272 MHz)
"(311MHz)

Sp%

'(246 MHz)
"(388MHz)
'(214MHz)
Sensitivity
ranking trend

Hidden layer

Input layer

Output layer

Figure 4. Architecture of ANN-M2

"(311MHz)
'(201MHz)
'(485MHz)

Table 2. Regression statistics of ANN-M2

"(427MHz)
"(414MHz)

wp%

Data Mean (%)

RMS Error (%)
RMS/Data Mean(%)

Training
82.5
3.46
4.2

Verification
87.9
2.65
3.0

Testing
87.5
3.13
3.6

Correlation (R2)

0.97

0.97

0.97

'(472MHz)
'(498MHz)
"(207MHz)
"(201MHz)

Sensitivity
ranking trend

Input layer

Hidden layer

Output layer

Figure 3. Architecture of ANN-M1

Table 1. Regression statistics of ANN-M1
Training
Data Mean (%)
14.8
RMS Error (%)
0.93
RMS/Data Mean (%) 6.3

Verification
14.6
1.60
10.9

Testing
14.7
0.95
6.5

Correlation (R2)

0.91

0.91

0.94

4.2 ANN-M2 - Prediction of Degree of Saturation

During the modeling of ANN-M2 for the prediction
of the degree of saturation, the network architecture
design and input variable selection are essentially
the same as that in ANN-M1. The data sets are
randomly divided to 67 training, 28 verification and
27 testing data sets. The best network has seven
neurons in the input layer, six neurons in the hidden
layer and one neuron in the output layer
corresponding to the predicted degree of saturation.
The architecture is shown in Figure 4. Among seven
inputs, the real part at frequency 201 MHz
((201MHz)) is the most distinguished input
according to the sensitivity analysis.
The network regression statistics are summarized
in Table 2. The RMS/Data-Mean values for the
training, verification and testing data sets are 4.2%,
3.0% and 3.6% respectively, indicating the model
performance is reliable and stable. The correlation
coefficients for the training, verification and testing
data sets are 0.97, 0.97 and 0.97, respectively. This
further proves that the developed model is able to
capture the essential association between the degree
of saturation and complex permittivity with
satisfactory performance.

ANN-M2 has only 7 input variables and 6 hidden

neurons. The simple architecture and less
complexity result in fast execution and good
network performance. Compared to ANN-M1 for
the prediction of soil water content, ANN-M2 has
higher correlation coefficients (R2) in the training,
verification and testing data sets and lower
RMS/Data-Mean values. The soil water content
represents the gravimetric ratio of water and dry
solids, while the degree of saturation represents the
volumetric ratio of water and the total voids. It is
known that the complex permittivity is closely
associated with the volumetric fractions of the water,
air and solids in soil-water systems (Kraszewski
1997). Consequently, the complex permittivity is
more sensitive to the changes in the degree of
saturation than to the changes in the soil water
content (the mass of water divided by the mass of
dry solids based on soil mechanics definition),
which results in higher correlation coefficients in
ANN-M2 than those in ANN-M1. The independent
development of ANN-M1 and ANN-M2 leads to the
different ANN architectures, as shown in Figures 3
and 4. It is also shown that the most significant input
and sensitivity rankings are quite different in ANNM1 and ANN-M2.
4.3 ANN-M3 - Prediction of Soil Dry Density
Soil density is routinely measured in a geotechnical
investigation. Scholte 1999, Xie 1999 and Josic
2001 prepared the soil specimens with relatively
consistent dry densities. This was intended to
observe the effects of other factors such as the soil
water content and pore fluid composition on the
complex permittivity. Shang et al. (2000) developed
a number of linear regression models to relate three

Proceedings ISC2 on Geotechnical and Geophysical Site Characterization, Viana da Fonseca & Mayne (eds.)

893

independent variables, namely, the water content,

bulk density and salinity, to the soil complex
permittivity at specific frequencies using data
collected by Scholte (1999). It was found that the
bulk density was significant only at a frequency of
200 MHz, and became insensitive at frequencies
higher than 200 MHz; thereby it was dropped from
the linear regression models. During the ANN
modeling process, it is found that the complex
permittivity data as the only inputs are not adequate
to achieve reliable network performance, because
the soil volumetric water content plays a
predominant role in the soil complex permittivity,
which overshadowed the effect of density (Ding,
2002). Therefore, a sub-model named as ANN-v is
developed to predict the volumetric water content as
an aid in the prediction of dry density. Details of the
modeling procedure and model performance,
including input variable selection, function
parameter selection, network architecture design,
and statistics of network performance, can be found
in Ding (2002). The output of the volumetric water
content is used as one of the inputs in ANN-M3. It
should be noted that the prediction capacity of
ANN-M3 is not compromised by requiring the
volumetric water content as an input. The volumetric
water content values are generated as outputs from a
sub-ANN model and are not directly measured from
experiments.
The best network for the prediction of dry density
is found to be an MLP network after a number of
trials, as shown in Figure 5. The model consists of
nine input neurons, five hidden neurons, and a single
output corresponding to the dry density of Halton
Till. According to the sensitivity analysis, the
volumetric water content (vp%) plays the key role
in the prediction. Due to the lower sensitivity of the
dry density to the complex permittivity and the
effects caused by other factors such as the soil water
content and pore fluid chemistry, a different
approach is adopted in the training process of this
model, including development of sub-model, the
lower learning rate and larger number of epochs
(Ding 2002). Following the similar procedure in
ANN-M1 and ANN-M2, 122 data sets are randomly
divided into 78 training, 24 verification and 20
testing data sets.
The regression statistics of this model are
summarized in Table 3. The RMS/Data-Mean values
of the training, verification and testing data sets are
1.6%, 1.6% and 2.5%, respectively, which indicates
the relatively stable and satisfactory performance of
the model. The correlation coefficients for the
training data sets, verification data sets and testing
data sets are 0.85, 0.92 and 0.75 respectively. The
correlation coefficient of the testing data set is lower
than those of the training and verification data set,
which may be due to the rather narrow range of the
dry density in the database, and the noise introduced
894

by other influencing factors such as the soil water

content and pore fluid composition. The
performance of the network can be improved upon
obtaining more representative data sets for training.
* vp%
" (369MHz)
' (356MHz)
' (201MHz)
dp (Mg/m3)

" (285MHz)
" (382MHz)
' (375MHz)
'' (240MHz)
" (291MHz)
Sensitivity
ranking trend

Input layer

Hidden layer

Output layer

Figure 5. Architecture of ANN-M3

Table 3. Regression statistics of ANN-M3

Data Mean (Mg/m3)

RMS Error (%)
RMS/Data Mean (%)
Correlation (R2)

Training
1.88
0.031
1.6
0.85

Verification
1.87
0.029
1.6
0.92

Testing
1.91
0.048
2.5
0.75

5 CONCLUSIONS
The complex permittivity of Halton Till, a soil
recovered from a landfill site in Halton, Ontario,
Canada, was measured using a custom developed
apparatus in laboratory in the frequency range from
0.3 MHz to 1.3 GHz. A database consisting of 122
soil specimen measurements is established for
modeling purposes. Artificial Neural Networks
(ANNs) are adopted and three MLP models named
as ANN-M1 for predicting the soil water content,
ANN-M2 for predicting the degree of saturation, and
ANN-M3 for predicting the dry density are trained,
verified, and tested. The models have appropriate
architectures, reasonable complexities, and reliable
performance. The models are able to predict soil
properties with potential affecting factors changing
in a relatively broad range. The experimental results
used as the input and output data were measured by
three researchers, which indicates that the random
assignment of the data sets used for the training,
verification and testing is independent.
For each soil specimen, there are 47 complex
permittivity data ( and ) measured available as
input variables, and there is only one set of output
representing the soil water content, degree of
saturation and dry density. Therefore, one of the
keys to achieve good performance in the modeling
2004 Millpress, Rotterdam, ISBN 90 5966 009 9

process is to reduce the input variables (Ding 2002).

The most representative and significant input
variables are selected to relate the corresponding
outputs, thereby to establish the most representative
relationship between the inputs and outputs. The
developed models perform well as judged in terms
of the RMS/Data-Mean values and correlation
coefficients. It is noted that the correlation
coefficient in the testing data sets of ANN-M3
(R2=0.75) is slightly lower than those of the training
data sets (R2=0.85) and verification data sets
(R2=0.92) due to the rather narrow range of the dry
density of soil specimens. The performance of
ANN-M3 model can be further improved when a
more comprehensive database is available.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The research is supported by the Natural Science
and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Dr.
R.K. Rowe was involved in the supervision of three
graduate students involved in the research related to
data collection.
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